Single Volvo Truck Manages to Tow 750 Tonnes

By
Trevor English

May, 31st 2016

0 shares

0comments

As the transport industry continues to grow, it has left truck manufacturers to come up with innovative ways to make their tractor trailers stand out from the competition. When it comes to picking the right truck, drivers often look at things like torque ratio and how much a truck can tow. Volvo has proved that their trucks are superior by completing a rather amazing test, pulling 750 tonnes, 825 US tons, with one single truck. Obviously, that weight refers to the dead weight and not the resistive rolling force, but the feat is a world first nonetheless. Check out the video of the Volvo FH16 pulling a long train of fully loaded trailers below.

Pulling this amount of weight and length of load on a typical roadway would be impossible, but this amazing feat shows just how much Volvo trucks can do. To add a little awesomeness to the challenge, Volvo enlisted the world's strongest man as the driver of the rig, Magnus Samuelsson. You don't have to be the world's strongest man to drive a Volvo, but in a challenge like this, we guess it probably helps.

Looking a little into the physics here, the initial burst of energy is by far the highest seen throughout the challenge. The trucks engine has to overcome the static friction of the wheels in order to get everything moving. You can see how much strain this puts on the cab as it lifts up when the train of crates first starts to move. After all of this mass is moving, the truck builds up momentum, and the strain on the engine is much less. Since the rig is moving, kinetic friction comes into play, which makes the resistive forces of motion shrink compared to when it was stationary. An amazing feat of engineering regardless.

If a truck was ever to bring this amount of weight up to highway speeds, it would take an incredible distance to stop the cars, not to mention how many disk brakes you would wear through. So, if you are in the market for a semi truck, Volvo can do just about anything.